Pope & Talbot Plans To Shut Down 142-Year-Old Washington Sawmill Dwindling Timber Supplies, High Log Prices Blamed For Closure

Workers who returned from a 10-week layoff at the Pope & Talbot Inc. sawmill here Monday learned the mill is being closed permanently, victim of higher prices for logs and lower prices for lumber.

“You come back to work, and get your notice,” said Chuck Blem, an engineer at the 142-year-old mill.

“This decision has been long and hard,” said Michael Flannery, general manager for Pope & Talbot’s wood products division. “We’ve been here through fire, pestilence, civil war, two world wars and a couple of depressions.”

The announcement to employees in the town auditorium was greeted with stunned silence. The mill already had laid off its second shift and dropped responsibility for maintaining the town and its historic homes. It was restarting Monday after a 10-week shutdown, the latest in a series of stints of idleness. But employees had returned hoping the work would last.

Though some had seen this coming, the announcement was a blow to employees.

“I came as close to crying today as I’ve been in a long, long time,” said Tom Hard, a carpenter at the mill for 15 years.

Established as the Puget Mill Co., the sawmill, on an inlet about 12 miles west of Seattle, is said to have been the first big mill on the west side of Puget Sound in Washington state.

Under its namesake founders William C. Talbot and Andrew J. Pope, two young entrepreneurs from Machias, Maine, it quickly became the largest enterprise in the Puget Sound. As it prospered, it sprouted a quaint town of colonial homes that remains carefully preserved today.

In the early 1980s, the company overhauled the once-anachronistic mill with the latest in technology for high-volume output. In the last seven years, Flannery said, the company spent $12 million on new equipment at the mill, including a new lumber kiln and an ill-fated plant to make pellets for wood-burning stoves.

But the mill had been in a tailspin for about 10 years, Flannery said, down to 1,200 logs being processed daily from 5,600 logs a day in the early 1980s.

Driven by demand for high-quality raw logs overseas, timber prices have risen to $600 to $1,200 a log, about 25 percent more than the company can afford to pay, he said.

At the same time, lumber prices have been dropping for the last year, partly because of competition from Canadian mills. Pope & Talbot’s three mills in British Columbia are prospering, company officials said.

A third factor has been dwindling timber supplies, partly because of environmental restrictions, after decades of heavy logging.

“I don’t see any evidence of these changing,” Flannery said.

Pope & Talbot, which now buys trees from private owners and state-owned lands, has 18 million board feet of logs en route to the mill, normally about a four-month supply. Flannery said some would be cut into lumber and the rest sold as raw logs.

The final shutdown is scheduled for October.

A recent study by Paul F. Ehinger, an Oregon timber analyst, shows that from 1989 to last April, 166 mills closed in Oregon and Washington.

Shutdown of the Port Gamble mill is “just one more in the whole chain,” Flannery said. “It won’t be the last.”

“You kind of feel part of you is going away,” said Francis Richardson, a pipefitter and third-generation mill worker.

The five-mill company, based in Portland, was founded as Puget Mill Co. by Talbot and Pope in September 1853. It quickly became the largest enterprise in the Puget Sound region.

The town it spawned still features a picturesque assortment of Colonial homes, some rented by mill workers for as little as $250 a month.

Layoff of the entire evening shift in May had left 96 employees, 75 of them union workers.

“We kept hoping it would turn around again. The timber market’s always a roller coaster,” shipping superintendent Roger L. Rogers said. “I thought we’d last longer. I thought we’d go another three years.

“It’s just like getting kicked in the gut.”